Andrei Kirilenko

Andrei Pavlovich Kirilenko (8 September 1906-12 May 1990) was a member of the Secretariat of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 8 April 1966 to 22 November 1982, serving as Leonid Brezhnev's chief lieutenant.

Biography
Andrei Pavlovich Kirilenko was born in Alexeyevka, Voronezh Governorate, Russian Empire in 1906 to a family of working-class Ukrainians. He graduated from a local vocational school in the 1920s and from the Rybinsk Aviation Technology Institute. He became a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1930, and he climbed up the Soviet hierarchy through the "industrial ladder". By the 1960s, he was Vice-Chairman of the Bureau of the Central Committee of the Russian SFSR. After Nikita Khrushchev's forced resignation, Kirilenko became Leonid Brezhnev's chief lieutenant within the Central Committee. His main task was to maintain and expand Brezhnev's control over the CPSU, and he was responsible for personnel selection and detailed supervision of the economic planning of the CPSU during most of the Brezhnev era. In 1976, Brezhnev appointed Konstantin Chernenko to be his counterweight in the Central Committee, but he was forced to resign from active politics due to health reasons, leaving the Central Committee in 1982. He died in 1990 in Moscow.